They’ve removed Helen Keller...I’d wonder if it’s because someone finally told them that she became a radical Socialist, who would later help fund the ACLU, and wasn’t just that “Deaf and Blind girl who done learned to talk.” If they did, I might be able to credit Texas State Board of Education with some brain cells. It seems unlikely. Fun fact: though people like to use Helen Keller in hackneyed inspirational stories and crow about how she learned to speak, none of them are the least bit interested in what she had to say.

Helen Keller is still extremely well known and was also a major historical figure who deserves to be remembered - teach kids about the positives of her life and the way she contributed to the world and teach them that even great people have their flaws. If the reason she's being expunged is down to her politics that's just ridiculous. And a decision I would expect to be made by people who are probably studiously getting all their news from Fox and pretending that this makes them well rounded .

The local news interviewed a woman from El Paso who said she was glad Hillary was being cut out but thought Helen Keller should be kept in.

How are they planning to cover the election of Trump? Trump ran unopposed in 2016 ... or... Although Trump lost the popular vote to She Who Must Not Be Named in 2016 he still got the Electoral College?

Come on, Sue - there is no way that they will mention that he lost the popular vote.

In fact, there wasn't any need for a vote at all. Jesus Christ came down, crowned in glory, and placed said crown upon Trump's head, saying that Trump is his divinely appointed servant and all those who believe otherwise, are jealous poopy-heads. Also Trump's rod and staff is...I'll stop here and fish myself, save everyone the trouble.

Back to Helen Keller, while her admiration for Lenin may seem shortsighted and treasonous by our standards, she was hardly alone in this. A lot of people on the Left looked with admiration on the Russian Revolution and the government that came into power as a result. It seemed like a dream come true, the tyranny of the Czar had been overthrown and now the means of production belong to the people and everything's going to be great! They may have been naïve in their views of Lenin and what he represented, but hindsight is always 20/20. After all, there were government leaders who initially praised Hitler before they wound up fighting against him.

In any case, what led to Helen Keller eventually embracing Socialism, was her realization that so much of what she had accomplished, was possible because she was the child of wealthy Southern gentry who could afford to pay for the best possible education for their deaf-blind daughter. If she had been born to Joe and Jane Sharecropper, she might have been dumped in state facility to rot.

What led her to this revelation was touring factory and mill towns, witnessing the squalor and poverty the workers lived in and the effects it had on them and their children. When she sat down and tried to simplify the Braille alphabet to make it easier for everyone to use, Keller quickly realized that blindness wasn't an affliction equally distributed among all social levels, but was concentrated at the very bottom of the societal pyramid. The poor were more likely to get sick, get hurt, and thus become blind as a result.

In her words:

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I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate— that we could mold our lives into any form we pleased. . . . I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. . . . I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone. —HELEN KELLER

And I suppose I should really stop bringing all this up--it barely connects to anything--but I just find it really interesting. History cannot and isn't ever treated neutrally by the wider culture, and invariably, historical figures wind up being put under various lens and ideas. Again for all the talk about how Inspirational™ Helen Keller is, culture has kept her forever frozen in childhood, and while they acknowledge that she learned to speak, they keep her silent as well.

Though Helen Keller was well aware of how she was regarded, after embracing Socialism. In response to an editorial basically saying, "Well she's deaf and blind, which probably affects her ability to reason," she talked about how she had met him at a party:

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“At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him.”

Again, Keller is celebrated for learning to speak, but culture continually silences her, because they'd rather not hear a word she has to say.

Back to Helen Keller, while her admiration for Lenin may seem shortsighted and treasonous by our standards, she was hardly alone in this. A lot of people on the Left looked with admiration on the Russian Revolution and the government that came into power as a result.

Again, Keller is celebrated for learning to speak, but culture continually silences her, because they'd rather not hear a word she has to say.

That's not unique to Helen Keller. My biggest issue with erasing any notable woman from a history curriculum is that there are so few women who have ever been considered "worthy" enough to even be mentioned in a history book in the first place. That the effort (it seems) to silence and erase women who do not conform to a rigid standard is even newsworthy is a good thing, I guess. Up until fairly recently no one was even noticing.

Perhaps the most overtly dogmatic cut was the deletion of the phrase, "such as holding public officials to their word" from a fourth-grade unit on how to participate in civic affairs. But the erasure of Helen Keller, an iconic advocate for the deaf and blind whose social activism also included women's suffrage, birth control and pacifism -- who is currently taught as part of a third-grade unit on citizenship -- is an underhanded play with a troubling message: that homogeny is normal and exposure to outside perspectives should be limited.
To remove Keller from the curriculum also means to eliminate the single touchstone for deafness and disability for most mainstream students. Earlier this week, I asked a room of 35 of my own college students if they'd ever met a deaf person who wasn't me. Four or five raised their hands—they worked retail and had seen deaf customers. Many of these students are considering fields like social work, education, criminal justice, occupational and speech therapy and law, where knowledge of deafness and disability will be integral to their work, and still their exposure is extremely limited long past the third grade. This is the norm in a society that constantly tells us to avert our eyes from disabled people, to separate out "normal" and "other."

Back to Helen Keller, while her admiration for Lenin may seem shortsighted and treasonous by our standards, she was hardly alone in this. A lot of people on the Left looked with admiration on the Russian Revolution and the government that came into power as a result. It seemed like a dream come true, the tyranny of the Czar had been overthrown and now the means of production belong to the people and everything's going to be great! They may have been naïve in their views of Lenin and what he represented, but hindsight is always 20/20.

No, they were just stupid. This isn't hard.

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After all, there were government leaders who initially praised Hitler before they wound up fighting against him.

Yes, Stalin.

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In any case, what led to Helen Keller eventually embracing Socialism, was her realization that so much of what she had accomplished, was possible because she was the child of wealthy Southern gentry who could afford to pay for the best possible education for their deaf-blind daughter. If she had been born to Joe and Jane Sharecropper, she might have been dumped in state facility to rot.

And the Russian Revolution helped ordinary farmers out of poverty? Come on.

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What led her to this revelation was touring factory and mill towns, witnessing the squalor and poverty the workers lived in and the effects it had on them and their children. When she sat down and tried to simplify the Braille alphabet to make it easier for everyone to use, Keller quickly realized that blindness wasn't an affliction equally distributed among all social levels, but was concentrated at the very bottom of the societal pyramid. The poor were more likely to get sick, get hurt, and thus become blind as a result.

None of this has anything to to do with the Russian Revolution. This isn't hard.

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Again, Keller is celebrated for learning to speak, but culture continually silences her, because they'd rather not hear a word she has to say.

Because embracing Leninism should embarrass any human being. This isn't people not wanting to listen to a deaf and blind woman. This is people not wanting to listen to a woman who apparently doesn't mind mass murder.

Ignoring the vast oversimplification and hindsighting, shouldn't history books include people on the "wrong" side of history? How will we recognize the negative in modern politics if we haven't seen how it worked before?

Ignoring the vast oversimplification and hindsighting, shouldn't history books include people on the "wrong" side of history? How will we recognize the negative in modern politics if we haven't seen how it worked before?

A very good point.

Don't silence Keller. Teach why she said what she did; and why and where she was wrong. It wasn't only Keller, after all; a lot of people made that same mistake for similar reasons.

Ignoring the vast oversimplification and hindsighting, shouldn't history books include people on the "wrong" side of history? How will we recognize the negative in modern politics if we haven't seen how it worked before?

That is a really good point. The problem with historical orthodoxy, which treats historical figures as white marble icons, practically perfect in every way, is not only is it bad history, it’s boring history. It robs the great story of any drama, any points where you can speculate on “What if we’d done X instead of Y?” You could study how Andrew Johnson handled Reconstruction, the background from which he approached it, judge where he succeeded, where he failed, and what he should have done. Also with that in mind, there could be an interesting discussion/debate as to whether Lincoln would have done better, how would he have approached Reconstruction.

Having our historical figures as plaster saints is not only boring, but it also robs the great story of any heroes and inspiration. You can draw inspiration from a flawed human being who managed to, at times, overcome their flaws and accomplish great things. After all, you can dredge up some quotes where President Lincoln was pretty damn racist, yet he still freed the slaves.

Sorry to keep going back to Lincoln, but he is such a good example. There’s such a wealth of material to explore like how the beliefs he had at the beginning of his career, changed, and how he played and used politics to his advantage.

If he was speaking for a group of staunch abolitionists, his language is more anti-slavery, than he would be if he was talking to people in the slave-owning states in the Union. That was an oft-heard criticism of his Emancipation Proclamation: it freed the slaves in Confederate states, but left out the slave-owning states in the Union. There’s something to talk about there why Lincoln might have done this, whether he was right to have done so, and what might have happened if he had proclaimed ALL the slaves to be free.

With this kind of historical education, it teaches that all the back-biting and double-dealing in politics is absolutely nothing new and is part of a longstanding tradition. Knowing details like the Founding Fathers likely celebrated the writing of the Constitution, by getting royally, stinking drunk, humanizes them and makes them so much more interesting than how they are often used, invoked as godlike figures.